I rather feared forThe Great Gatsbyin the hands of Baz Luhrmann: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel is a slender, poetic ragtime lament, while the Australian director is known for his love of pumped-up spectacle. When you try to turn a nightingale into a peacock, you can end up with an awful mess of feathers.

For the first hour or so, that’s precisely what we get. The film is framed by the conceit that Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), the novel’s narrator, is writing “Gatsby” as a therapeutic exercise at his wintry sanatorium. From behind my 3D glasses, the snow around the window-sills looked like cotton wool, and I already had the woozy sense of falling headlong into the airbrushed realm of the dopily fantastical.

Thereafter, Luhrmann plunges into the Twenties and flails around with the glitter-shaker, tacking on hip-hop music and speeded-up footage to convey the sense of a blinging boom-time gone crazy. Yet, every era goes nuts in its own style, and I’d prefer to see a truer vision of Twenties decadence rather than the Noughties gussied up in flapper skirts.

While the bass is thumping and the camera whooshing about, we are missing some rather important things. When Nick first meets his distant cousin Daisy (Carey Mulligan), her brutally moneyed, polo-playing husband Tom (Joel Edgerton), and their golfing friend Jordan (Elizabeth Debicki), the mood is supposed to be one of semi-sophisticated, ironic languor.

That distinctive tone of the Twenties in which nothing must be taken seriously - and in which Tom’s emphatic, but intellectually second-rate, racial theorising strikes a crudely discordant note.

But languor takes time to establish, and Luhrmann can’t slow down for it, so the book’s best-known quotes are instead treated to a cinematic equivalent of the highlighter pen.

As the film progresses, however, the actors between them manage to wrestle back some of the spirit of the novel. Mulligan exudes a sweet melancholy, which later slips into a tremulous emotional paralysis, and her scenes with Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jay Gatsby have the genuine charge of attraction.

DiCaprio, for his part, catches the combination of idealism and gaudiness in Gatsby’s character: the purity of his goal (winning and protecting Daisy) and the corruption he wades through in order to amass the glittering resources to attract her.

Certain scenes stick. When Daisy comes to Nick’s house for tea, and she and Gatsby see each other for the first time in five years, there is an air of delighted complicity as they whisper in the ludicrously flowery bower that Gatsby has created. For a time, his dream intoxicates her – as when she rolls around in his exquisite handmade shirts – until her confidence in it begins to fray.

Luhrmann is a bold showman, and his spectacle diverts the eyes, while the cast gestures towards the heart. But the full range of the perceptions and sorrow in the novel – at a kind of splendour burned to dust, felt most keenly at Gatsby’s funeral – has been reduced. Instead, the story has been given several glossy coats of kitsch.

One has the mournful sense that not only has Luhrmann plucked a lily, gilded it, and studded it with Swarovski crystals, but in the process that it has lost a great deal of its distinctive scent.